


Welcome to the Builder's League

by bellepeppertronix



Category: Team Fortress 2
Genre: Gen, Team Bonding, Team as Family
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-15
Updated: 2014-11-15
Packaged: 2018-02-25 11:10:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,253
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2619623
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bellepeppertronix/pseuds/bellepeppertronix
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The BLU team, after months battling with an eight-person team, finally get a Scout.<br/>Unfortunately, he doesn't seem like much of a team player...</p>
            </blockquote>





	Welcome to the Builder's League

“Disastrous,” the Medic muttered. “Simply disastrous. Oh, they expect us to believe they simply _forgot_ to recruit a Scout for us, until _now_? It has been how many months, Herr Heavy? How many?” 

The big Russian sitting beside him shrugged; he was having the time of his life, snacking on delectable little sandwiches the Medic had packed in a cooler, and, for the first time in long months, doing nothing more strenuous than sitting and watching the clouds go by.

“Well, I will tell you, if it weren’t for--” the Medic hesitated, wrung his hands, and then made an exasperated noise before continuing, “Well! I would tell them _exactly_ what I thought!”  
“Is not so bad, Doktor,” the Heavy said. “After all, if not for hard work, maybe we would not be so close, as a team!”

“Close, ach, yes, close, mein Herr, the best thing about--for goodness’ sake, what is holding up that _train_! We have been sitting here for--” he checked his wristwatch, “Mein gott, it has been an hour. An _hour_!”

The Heavy said nothing. He leaned forward, popped the cooler’s lid open, and took out a foil-wrapped sandwich, so cool there were droplets of moisture beaded on the foil.  
“Doktor. Eat.”  
The German gave him a peevish look. “I am not hungry.”

The Heavy’s smile was gentle. “Doktor says this. But you did not have breakfast. You are cranky, like tired baby! Eat. Please?”

The Engineer watched their little exchange with a half-smile on his face, chuckling a little at the way the Medic fussily unfolded the foil at exact, perfect angles, and equally-fussily bit one corner off first. 

While they talked--or, well, while the Medic bickered with no one and the Heavy soothed him afterwards--he stood a little ways off, down closer to the dusty wooden platform where the train tracks ran. He had one foot braced up on a broken crate, his guitar resting in the crook of his thigh as he strummed it idly. 

He himself had no particular thoughts, only high hopes: they’d all been working as a team for almost nine months now, and the addition of a new member was something he was looking forward to. He figured it would be a bit of relief to the monotony, at least; in a place as remote as this, they didn’t get much contact from the outside world.  
The others’ voices came drifting back over to where he was standing. 

“...Should have stayed back on the base...the Pyro is probably running around setting the rats on fire, calling it ‘housekeeping’. And the Soldier, with his newest ‘battle plans’ to test the new recruit! Hah! We will be lucky if any of the quarters are still standing when we return!”

“Would not have been proper welcome, if only one member of team comes to pick new member up,” the Heavy pointed out.

“The Engineer is here! I do not see the point in--in--” the Medic actually paused and tugged slightly at the knot of his sky-blue tie, grimacing.  
The Engineer chuckled. 

“Doktor,” the Heavy said, still gentle, but more firmly.  
The Medic responded to his words by taking an absolutely savage bite out of his sandwich; the Engineer laughed, and finally straightened up to walk over to them.  
“Heat gettin’ to ya, Doc?” he asked.

The Medic, cheeks still bulging, glanced at him and managed to smooth the annoyance off his face long enough to smile and nod at him.

“Well, weather forecast says we’re due for some cooler days up ahead. I wouldn’t get too worked up.”

The Heavy remarked, “Cool is relative term, Engineer...I say ‘cool day’, I mean, ‘maybe snow, maybe only rain’. You say ‘cool day’...” he held one big hand out, palm up, and looked up at the blue sky, at the sheet-thin wisps of cloud overhead. 

He met the Engineer’s eyes again and only gave him a wry smile.  
The Engineer had to laugh. “Well, when you put it like that, I see what ya mean. But don’t you worry; at the least it won’t be hot enough to fry eggs on the metal siding.”  
“For a few days,” the Medic muttered.

The Engineer chuckled again; the Heavy gave the Engineer an exasperated, put-upon look, and a very dramatic, very deep sigh.

Moments later they heard a soft, distant rumble of a diesel locomotive’s engines. He could hear the crossing-bells start up, next, though,the train did not not blow its air horn; BLU’s trains usually didn’t, what with large sections of the rail they were using being considered dead lines, not in use by any companies besides RED or BLU. 

~

The train came chuffing along the tracks, setting the ground vibrating, the fumes from its engines fit to choke them all.  
They all backed off as the train squealed to a halt; it was a full minute before a door opened.

He wasn’t expecting anything, he told himself. And this was true; but that had meant he wasn’t expecting a boy of maybe twenty standing there, squinting, shielding his eyes from the high noon sunlight with one hand raised palm-outwards towards the sky.  
He didn’t use the steps; he just hopped down, his feet thumping dully on the old, weatherbeaten wood. 

The Engineer could see the boy seemed to have come with nothing but two battered suitcases and a worn gray canvas messenger bag. The tape-wrapped handle of a baseball bat was sticking up out of the bag’s flap.

“Hey. You guys with the Builder’s League or whoever?”  
“Yessir, we most certainly are,” the Engineer said. “Howdy! You can call me Engineer. How was your trip?”

He stuck out his hand to shake, and the boy hastily wiped his hand on his pants and shook his--thin fingers with callused fingertips and the slightly rough feel of the old knuckle tape his hands were wrapped in.

“Yeah, uh. Nice ta meetcha. You can call me Scout, I guess. That’s what the paperwork said. You guys really don’t use your real names? I thought that was just some company rah-rah crap.”

Before the Engineer could explain, he was turning to grab his other suitcase, still talking.  
“And this whole thing is startin’ to seem really fuckin’ creepy! Nobody was on the train ‘cept me, the whole way down,” the kid said.

A moment later he turned around to look at them, suspicion crawling across his features.  
“Hey...ain’t this supposed to be a war or some shit? Where’s the rest’a you?”  
“You’ll meet some more of the team directly. Need some help with your bags?” the Engineer said.

The boy shrugged. “Nah. I got it.” And he set one suitcase down and rummaged in the messenger bag a moment, absently making annoyed faces, until he came up with what he wanted--a faded gray ballcap, which he pulled on. 

Once he stopped squinting, the Engineer could immediately tell two things: that his eyes were not gray, they were blue; and that he was probably younger, even, than he had pegged him for. 

“Most of the team’s back at the base. Er, that there’s our Medic n’ the Heavy,” the Engineer said.  
The Heavy, one arm clamped over the Medic’s shoulders, all but dragged him forward to meet the newcomer.

“Hallo!” he shouted, grinning, “I am Heavy Weapons Guy! And THIS,” he slapped the Medic on the back, causing the other man to wobble on his feet and shoot an exasperated look over at the Heavy, “Is my Doktor!”  
The Medic raised one hand in a very brief wave. “Very nice to meet you.”

The Scout took one look at them and a smile kind of flitted across his face, disbelief written all over his features. 

“Uh. War, right? So why the geezers? Shouldn’t you guys be, like, sitting in rocking chairs somewhere, yellin’ at kids to get off’a your lawn?” the Scout asked, his mouth quirking.

The Engineer cleared his throat; the Heavy gave him a look that was equal parts amusement and annoyance. “Actually, leetle man, _you_ are youngest member of team.”

“We are an elite corps of professional mercenaries,” the Medic said, sniffing. “The Builder’s League requested our work due to our expertise in our respective fields--expertise gained over years in said fields. And...tell me, Herr Scout,” he asked, “What, exactly, is the area in which you have years of experience? Because I can tell it is not etiquette.”  
The Scout snickered. “Least you ain’t senile on top’a bein’ old. So, where’s the base?”

~

“You’ll be wantin’ a tour,” the Engineer said. “The place is a darned maze, if you don’t know where you’re goin’.”

They stood in the tawny-orange dirt out back behind the base, beside the company Hudson. The Medic and Heavy had wasted no time in hurrying back inside, the Medic excusing himself with nothing more than a cursory apology; the Engineer watched him hurry away, plucking at the collar of his sweat-sodden shirt. The Heavy had not fared any better: his t-shirt was plastered to his back, a big arrowhead of sweat darkening the fabric from Builder’s League blue to almost navy. 

The ride back had been uneventful; there wasn’t much in the way of scenery to explain. The road was dirt, little more than a track worn into the hard-baked earth by the company trucks. No one else came this way; every other piece of property for miles was abandoned, it seemed. Dell would never understand why, exactly, BLU would want set up a base of operations around a rail stop in the middle of nowhere. They seemed to make a habit out of setting up bases on abandoned, unwanted property, though, and he figured that it wasn’t his business where his higher-ups wanted to send them, as long as they kept signing his paychecks. 

If the Scout had noticed the number of derelict, ramshackle buildings dotting the horizon as they drove past, he hadn’t said anything. He’d spent the drive staring off at the horizon, occasionally shifting in his seat, and would from time to time ask if anyone had any gum or candy or anything.

Now they stood just in front of the base, and the Scout was looking up at it with an increasingly skeptical face.

“This...don’t look nothin’ like a mercenary base...” he said.  
The Engineer shrugged a little, chuckling. “Well, what were you expecting?”  
“Honestly?” the Scout looked from the crooked corrugated metal roof, at the weatherbeaten gray boards of the walls, and finally down at the rickety foundations some of the raised buildings stood on, and finished, “ For it to be a little bit less, uh...old and fallin’ apart.”

“Oh, don’t you worry none. This here’s just the back of the base.” The Engineer said.  
He thought it prudent not to mention that some parts of the rest of the base were actively worse. No reason to go scaring the poor boy off before he’d even gotten a chance to spend a day on the job, he figured.  
“So, our quarters are this way...” he said, gesturing with one hand. 

~

And he spent the next half-hour walking the Scout around and showing him the various amenities--or, in many cases, the jury-rigged excuses that passed for amenities. After taking him into the dormitories and showing his room (a concrete-floored shoebox with plaster walls, furnished with a plain metal-frame bed and desk and chair, which the Scout seemed oddly pleased with) the Engineer showed him where the showers were, and the yard. He explained the trains, why they would stop, and what they--BLU--had to do to secure the area from the REDs so they could use the rail line. 

The Scout didn’t ask any questions; he’d left his suitcases back in his designated room, save for the messenger bag, which remained slung over his shoulder. He seemed not to care too much what was happening, content to nod along to whatever the Engineer said to him.  
The Engineer was beginning to find his apparent LACK of curiosity stranger than if he’d been pestering him with questions.

~

They ran into the Demoman coming in from the garage where he kept his explosives, whistling and pleased.

“Afternoon, Demoman. We got us a new recruit!” the Engineer said. “A Scout!”  
“Och, took ‘em absolute ages enough. Well, then! That must be you, eh, boyo?” the Scotsman put his hands on his hips and gave the Scout an appraising look.  
“Uh. Hi?” the Scout tried.

“Ye look a wee bit young for this profession, lad,” the Demoman said.  
“Hey! This is the second time--you know what, I ain’t no kid! I can out-run, out-jump, an’ out-fight whatever you bunch’a creaky old geezers can throw at me!” the Scout said, his skinny chest stuck out. “An’ I ain’t scared, neither!”

The Demoman stared at him for a long moment before bursting into raucous hoarse laughter.  
“Oh, oh, aye! I can see ye got bark. I trust you’ve got some bite, as well,” he said.  
The Scout continued scowling.

“I’m just jokin’, lad. Ease up. Nice to meet you,” he said, and shook his hand so vigorously his whole torso bobbed with the motion.

He went through a different door, the Scout staring after him for a moment.  
“Didn’t know it was gonna be so integrated around here,” the Scout said, after a moment.  
The Engineer gave him a sharp, annoyed look. “Is that gonna be a problem? ‘Cause if it is, we can set up a call between you and corporate, and you can head home real fast.”

The Scout whirled around, his hands coming up in a placating gesture. “Wh--ah--naw, naw, it’s just--I was startin’ to get scared you guys was a bunch of those crazy hillbillies who wanna blow up the President.”

The Engineer snorted a little, at that, feeling relieved. “Well, as far as I know, we ain’t received any missions to storm the White House. Don’t you worry, though; if it’s explosions you want, Demoman’s got you covered.”  
And the Scout gave him a strange look, but laughed.

Their short tour ended, finally, in the mess hall-slash-common room, where the Pyro was rattling pots and pans around in the deep steel sinks. Greasy-looking soap bubbles crawled up the Pyro’s gloves, and the air was redolent with the aromas of food, and only barely tinged with the acrid smell of smoke.  
“Oh! Perfect timin’! Scout, this here’s our resident firebug, the Pyro.”

“H’ddoe!” the Pyro waved, splattering dishwater across the countertop. In place of their usual asbestos suit, they were wearing an only slightly-sooty blue mechanic’s coverall, along with their boots and gloves. They had replaced the nametag on the breast pocket with one of their own insignia patches, stitched on with baby-blue thread. Over that, they were wearing a soot-smudged blue-and-white striped apron, with sunflowers printed on it.

“Uh, nice ta meetcha,” the Scout said.  
“Pyro, this is our new Scout. Scout, I reckon we’re done with the tour--that’s all there is to see, more or less, an’ all the team to meet, except the Sniper. He’s real quiet, likes to keep to himself. Got himself a trailer-van he lives in, out back of the base. He comes ‘round every now an’ again. Mostly we see him on the battlefield--or, rather, we don’t. The REDs don’t, either, ‘til it’s too late for ‘em.” The Engineer chuckled a little. “You’ll meet him soon enough.” 

He paused, looking at the Scout, who kept glancing around curiously. He expected a barrage of questions--anything from how did the respawn room work, to why the enemy base was literally only a good stone’s throw away--but instead the young man only sort of shrugged and asked, “So whadda we do f’ grub ‘round here?” 

The boy spat his words out like wads of chewed gum he was tired of; the ‘here’ sounded like ‘he-ah’, and he swaggered down the hallway swinging his arms, the bat still dangling from the fingers of one bandaged hand. The Engineer noted that the wrappings were a dingy dishwater color, and he hadn’t once made any move to remove them.

“The common room an’ mess are the one and the same; right back through those doors. From the looks of things, everyone’s already comin’ down anyway.”  
The Scout nodded, tipping back the cap to scratch his forehead. 

The interior of the common room was blue and pale beige-yellow, non-descript as a hospital waiting room. A battered television set was arranged in one corner, surrounded by a semicircle of furniture: a somewhat dubious-looking brown tweed couch, and an armchair of similar material, which had also seen better days. 

Midway through the room, the floor went from scrubby gray-brown carpet to scuffed gray linoleum, the same color as in the outside hall, in which was obviously the ‘kitchen’ half of the room. The dinner table was long and narrow, with a nicked, worn formica top supported on rickety brushed-steel legs, bearing up the night’s dinner.

There was a platter of fried chicken, cooked almost to the point of inedibility; a large casserole dish full of mashed potatoes—again, with blackish flecks flecked throughout—beside a smaller tureen of brown gravy; a basket of dinner rolls, mercifully unscorched, and a smaller casserole of a somewhat unfortunate macaroni and cheese dish, whose edges were burnt to a uniform brown-black. Along with this there were two glass pitchers, one containing lemonade, and the other containing water.

The Demoman was already sitting at the table, drinking a glass of lemonade and staring down at a steno pad with notes scrawled all over its pages, and drawings of what looked like spiky cannonballs on the pages. 

The Medic and the Heavy, who earlier had split from the Engineer the impromptu tour of the base he had taken the Scout on, were standing in a corner near a window, talking quietly between themselves. Both of them had changed their clothes, and were no longer soaked in their own sweat. The Engineer paused to greet the two of them; the Scout walked over to the table and planted himself in a chair. Without much more ado, began piling food onto a plate.

Moments after they entered, the Soldier came in, back ramrod-straight and marching as if on parade, slamming the door open and closed. 

“Ah, hey, Soldier! How are ya?” the Engineer began. The Soldier froze him with a look, and the Engineer remembered himself enough to straighten up and drop the extended hand. “Ah. Well, it looks like dinner’s served. Why don’tcha—”

“The COMMANDING OFFICER does not LOWER HIMSELF by eating with those INFERIOR IN RANK to HIMSELF!” the Soldier announced, and marched from the room, having effectively sliced the Engineer’s greeting in half. 

The Scout paused to watch him leave; the Soldier, if he noticed him, said nothing.  
“Is, uh. Is he, like, the general? Or somethin’?” the Scout asked. 

The Engineer had to cover his grimace; the boy was talking through a mouth packed full of food.  
“Er--not really. That there’s the Soldier. He’s a bit stiff, ‘til you get to know ‘im. He’s all right,” the Engineer said.

He figured he’d wait until later to tell the boy that the Soldier rescued raccoons and would occasionally pause on the battlefield to scream and bash himself over the head with his shovel.

If he was worried about needing to put the younger man at ease, he realized he didn’t have to. The Scout had gone back to shoveling food into his mouth, piling even more onto his plate in between bites.

The Spy entered next, shrugging out of a navy-blue peacoat and hanging it on the coat-rack in the corner.  
“Evenin’, Spy,” the Engineer said.

The Spy acknowledged him with a haughty nod. The first actual words out of his mouth were, “What is that smell?”

“Smells like dinner,” the Engineer supplied, and nodded in the direction of the table.  
Which was laid with a rather lavish spread, compared to their normal meals--canned whatever, with a side of canned whatever-else. The Pyro would try to make big meals for everyone to share on the weekends or on special occasions. This time, the effect was rather ruined by the fact that the Scout had already started in.  
The Spy would probably have known about the Pyro’s dinners, the Engineer thought, if the haughty Frenchman could be bothered to stay out of his own room for longer than five minutes. 

The Spy made a doubtful noise--or a scornful one; it was hard to tell, with him--and then took his seat at the table.  
The Pyrotechnics Specialist emerged from the kitchen. They paused in the kitchen doorway and spread their arms wide. “HUDDAH!”

“Thank you kindly, Pyro,” the Engineer said, and meant it. Special occasion meals eaten with the team were the first home-cooked meals he had had in a long while, having subsisted on diner food and the occasional deli sandwich while waiting for the clearances with the Builders’ League to go through. And even though the home-cooked meals the Pyro made tended to be about ten percent charcoal, by his estimation, and exactly one-point-five percent foreign contaminant, he was not about to complain.

“Holy crap, this is good,” the Scout said by way of thanks, around a mouthful of partially masticated chicken chunks and macaroni.

The Demoman looked up from his sketchpad and chuckled. “Ye don’t waste time, do ye, lad?”

The Scout looked up from his plate, confused. He had food packed into one cheek like the world’s largest, least fuzzy, and most awkward chipmunk. “Uh. No?”

The Scotsman laughed a little, shaking his head. He looked around at the others. “Let’s hope it’s an omen, eh, gents?”

This got a chuckle from the Engineer, the Heavy, and the Medic, and an annoyed look from the Spy.

The Spy looked sideways at him, raised one eyebrow, and looked back at the Engineer.  
“Ah. Ahem. Scout? That there’s our Spy. Spy, this here’s our new Scout.”  
The Scout glanced up from his plate and half-smiled, extending a hand whose fingers were slightly dusted with biscuit crumbs in the Spy’s direction.  
“Hey. I’m the Scout,” he said. His mouth was still full of food.

On any other occasion, the Spy’s reaction of annoyed, barely-hidden disgust would have been leg-slappingly hilarious to the Engineer; at the moment, he just felt strong pangs of second-hand embarrassment for the young man, who stared obliviously at the Spy.

The Spy did not shake his hand.  
“How nice for you,” the Spy said, instead.

The Demoman snickered into his napkin, poorly disguising his amusement as a sneeze.  
But the Scout wasn’t paying close enough attention to either of them to be insulted, because when his hand remained unshaken, he simply went back to eating with it.  
Meanwhile, the Medic was very poorly disguising his shock at the charcoal-sprinkled meal. The Heavy just seemed pleased to be in front of food.  
“Much thanks, Pyro,” the Russian smiled. He took a seat, followed by the Medic, who cast a nervous glance down over the table’s contents. The Engineer noticed that he kept his hands in his lap.

The Heavy paused a moment to look at the Scout, before looking back at the Medic, his eyebrows raised in amusement.  
The Medic looked back at him and shook his head.

The Pyro went into a flurry of pulling chairs, fluffing seat cushions, and generally going out of their way to make the small kitchen-dining room seem as homey as possible.  
Everyone took their seats, excepting the Soldier, who had not returned.

The Scout decided to look up right as the Pyro plopped down across from him, realizing only then that the table was not completely full.

“How come’s there’s two emtpy chairs? Are those guys really not comin’ to dinner? Can I have their food?” the Scout spoke so quickly the Engineer had barely enough time to parse out what he’d said.

“We leave chairs open for Sniper and Soldier, because they are teammates,” the Russian explained, very slowly, to the Scout. “In case they want to come and eat. That way, no one is left out.”  
The Scout goggled at him a moment. 

“So...if they ain’t here by the time all’a you guys are finished, _then_ can I have their food?”  
“Alors, it is not as if you have not already eaten enough for two,” the Spy murmured.  
He was toying with his fork, his plate empty.  
The Scout did not seem to have heard him.

“Prss edh trrh dhh lfft,” the Pyro said.  
As they were seated at one end of the table, they handed the nearest dish to themselves—the macaroni, already pitted with a direly large crater from where the Scout had taken his portion—to the Engineer, who was closest to him at his left side. The Engineer accepted the macaroni with a smile, and spooned some onto his own plate. He considered handing the dish to the Scout, who was seated to his left, but ultimately decided against it, as the boy already had a quivering mound of cheesy noodles perched precariously on one of the edges of his plate, vying for space with an equally large mountain of mashed potatoes.

When the Spy made no move to make a plate for himself, the Pyro took it upon themselves to do it for him, scooping generous helpings of everything onto the Spy’s plate while the Spy tried to politely refuse.

The Engineer watched with bemusement, before passing the dish he was holding--the macaroni and cheese, whose middle looked at least unscorched. He was about to test that observation, himself.

“’Scuse me, Scout, goin’ over your head,” he said.  
“Yeah,” the Scout licked gravy off his fork, “Sure.”  
He handed it over the Scout’s plate, across to the Heavy, who nodded to thank him.  
The Medic took one look at the macaroni and accepted only a small scoop, while the Heavy took a decently-sized portion and no more. The Engineer knew that the Medic only even accepted the Pyro’s cooking as a polite formality; that after the meal, he usually returned to the kitchen to cook his own dinner. (He was not fond of American food, and the Pyro only ever cooked just that.) They passed around the rest of the food, and ate in a comfortable quiet of clinking silverware and low voices. 

He wondered at the Scout’s apparent lack of curiosity; years before, when he’d first arrived, he’d been itching with the suppressed desire to pester everyone with questions, and it had lasted for days. He had not been briefed much about his teammates—nothing aside from their nationalities and occupations, as the rest of the information had been detailed as classified and on a need-to-know basis. The first truly big surprise had been their Demolition Specialist, about which no one knew anything, except that he was Scottish. The Engineer was mildly surprised to find out that he was a colored man. 

Still the Demolition Specialist seemed to be one of the more jovial ones, even if he did drink more than was strictly necessary—but then, he thought, none of them were what anyone could call normal men. 

“Holy crap, this is so good,” the young man broke in again, and reached past the Engineer to snatch another roll. He broke it in half and liberally lathered it with gravy, disregarding the burnt chunks that the Engineer noticed the Medic subtly scooping out of his own gravy, and hiding under one of his rolls. 

“It’s just fried chicken,” the Engineer couldn’t hide his bemusement at the boy’s actions. “Doesn’t your ma make it for you every Sunday, anyway?” and of course, the Engineer thought, the boy had to be young enough that such dinners couldn’t be that distant of a memory; he looked twenty at the oldest—perhaps even a very well-proportioned seventeen or eighteen.

“Nah, she doesn’t normally cook. It’s not her thing.” The Scout said, shrugging. He went in for another roll, reaching over the Engineer’s plate a second time, again without excusing himself.

This time the Engineer picked up the basket and handed it to him. He waited with one eyebrow raised for the customary thanks--which never came. The Scout went back to inhaling his food as if he was never going to see another plate of it again. 

Even the Heavy Weapons Specialist, who was an absolute mountain of a man himself, sat dumbfounded at the young man’s seemingly bottomless stomach. The Scout was on his third plate--compared to the Heavy’s two, and everyone else’s one. He did not seem to notice their stares. A good while passed this way before the Spy stood up, archly, and made to leave the table.

“You gonna eat that, man?” and the Engineer was startled to see the Scout pointing at the Spy’s untouched plate with a finger that crosses his own line of sight and was dangerously close to the Medic’s face. 

The Spy sniffed, and replied, “Non. This is not acceptable; this is not even _food_ , anymore. I would have thought that our...cook...would have wanted our newest teammate’s first meal on base to at least be _edible_.”

The Pyro made a hurt noise and the Engineer turned to apologize for the Spy’s rudeness before anyone else had a chance to say anything, but the Scout was louder, and overrode him.  
“Well, holy crap, man, don’t throw it away! Give it ta me!”

The Engineer did not think he would ever get over being honestly surprised that the Spy’s balaclava was so expressive, but he could _feel_ the haughty disgust as plainly as he could see it through the thin knit cloth. He handed the plate of (really, only slightly) burnt food to the boy, who took it and began to add it to his own plate, still smacking his lips in relish.  
“Gentlemen,” the Spy said, dryly.

He didn’t look at the Pyro as he turned to leave, taking his coat as he went.  
As the Spy exited the room, the Sniper entered, looking slightly hunted. He paused half-in the doorway and allowed the Spy to pass with a blank face. He didn’t say anything as he passed through the common room and into the kitchen. A few moments later he was leaving, carrying a stoppered bottle of lemonade and two rolls. 

He paused in the doorway and mumbled, “Thanks, Pyro, mate...”  
The Pyro waved and gestured at the space saved for him.  
He returned the wave awkwardly, and hesitated when he saw the empty chair—but then strode out of the room on his thin legs.

The Scout watched him go, licking gravy off his bottom lip and swallowing.  
“Now can I have his food?” he asked.  
The Engineer’s mouth actually fell open.

Before he could say anything about how rude the young man was, the Medic wordlessly handed him his own plate.

“Thank you very much, Pyro,” he said, “I wish I could have enjoyed more...my stomach has been upset lately...”  
The Pyro made a concerned noise, but waved him off.  
They all watched the Scout start into his fourth plate.

The rest of the meal passed in an awkward silence, with the others too stunned to speak around the new Scout, who made no effort to speak to his teammates at all.


End file.
